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Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

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Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#81

Post by monerozcash »

alexfoo wrote: post #44
mdasen wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm imagining someone driving in England and the police having no way to input those letters into their system. I wonder if the Danish system would prevent ÆØÅ and AEOA from both being registered. Would the Danish system Match "ÆØÅ" if someone input "AEOA"? There are unicode normalization rules, but I wonder if systems would be built to handle that. If you're Danish, you'd just use those letters so it wouldn't be a u…

> I'm imagining someone driving in England and the police having no way to input those letters into their system. I would assume the UK has worked out a way of dealing with this having had plenty of years of foreign plates being driven around the country. Any Danish license plate driven in the UK will almost certainly have to a be an EU style plate with the blue band on the left with the "DK" country code. If someone…

>I would assume the UK has worked out a way of dealing with this having had plenty of years of foreign plates being driven around the country.

Based on my experience, the UK approach is to not even bother and try and collect fines from owners of foreign registered vehicles. They do sell them to some private company that has been sending me scary letters for 10 years soon.

Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#82

Post by Someone1234 »

jfindper wrote: post #74
komali2 wrote: post #43

I swear I read some case a couple years back where a kid was facing serious prison time for automating requests to w publicly available government website. "Unauthorized access of a computer." I think the author may have just admitted to what the government considers a serious federal crime, as stupid as it is to consider it a crime.

The fun thing about the computer fraud and abuse act is that just about anything can be made into a federal crime with it!

Considering it was created during a major moral panic after the movie "War Games" came out, by a bunch of politicians who knew nothing about computers (aside from, again, watching the movie War Games).

As a direct result, anything and everything can be a crime (e.g. violating a private company's Terms & Conditions), and the punishments are completely disproportionate to the actual criminality.

See the AT&T/iPad data leak, where AT&T were leaking private information on the internet with no security checks at all. Someone found it, told the press, who in turn told AT&T, but the FBI still investigated it as a "crime", raided their home, charged them with "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization." AT&T go no punishment at all.

Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#83

Post by Ylpertnodi »

ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote: post #70
macintux wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're in prison for a reason. Often that reason is "too poor to afford proper representation" or "looked vaguely like the actual criminal" or "took a plea bargain because the justice system was threatening them with an immorally-long wait for a trial and a likely worse outcome".

Often that reason is "committed a horrific violent crime"

Weed, though. In some states, now legal.

Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#84

Post by kelnos »

sphars wrote: post #34
yesitcan wrote: post #30

This has nothing to do with TypeScript

The scripts he wrote to pull the data were written in TypeScript, though all the TS I see is in the parameters in the function signature. Also he used Next.js for the dashboard

I think the GP's point was that the part of the article that's most interesting is the investigation into how the DMV's plate system works. The fact that Typescript was used is incidental (of course this could have been done in pretty much any language), and it's an odd choice to include the language choice in the article title.

Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#85

Post by consp »

cyral wrote: post #59
komali2 wrote: post #43

I swear I read some case a couple years back where a kid was facing serious prison time for automating requests to w publicly available government website. "Unauthorized access of a computer." I think the author may have just admitted to what the government considers a serious federal crime, as stupid as it is to consider it a crime.

Different scenario but it reminds me of when Missouri prosecuted a reporter who found that teacher's SSN numbers were exposed in the HTML of a webpage > "Parson described the journalist as a “perpetrator” who “took the records of at least three educators, decoded the HTML source code, and viewed the Social Security number of those specific educators” in an “attempt to steal personal information and harm Missourians.”…

Isn't html copyrightable and thus it is a publication? (And thus exposed by the author). Or am I in the wrong ballpark here?

Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#86

Post by Someone1234 »

LikesPwsh wrote: post #51
sltkr wrote: post #18

It's a fun story of course, but it also seems that people like OP who abuse public APIs are why we can't have nice things, and why so many web pages these days are bogged down by Cloudflare and Anubis interstitials that waste human time.

Skiddies targeting an individual site are a drop in the ocean compared with the industrial scale LLM scraping, so blaming them for it is in bad taste.

The difference is that the government won't charge a major LLM vendor with a crime, but they may kick in John Smith's front door and ruin their life.

Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#87

Post by theSuda »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #48
komali2 wrote: post #43

I swear I read some case a couple years back where a kid was facing serious prison time for automating requests to w publicly available government website. "Unauthorized access of a computer." I think the author may have just admitted to what the government considers a serious federal crime, as stupid as it is to consider it a crime.

Arguably the most famous one is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...

Whoa. That was an interesting read.

Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#88

Post by [deleted] »

embedding-shape wrote: post #38
grimgrin wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since you didn't know about for-profit prisons, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison

I'm very well aware of private prisons, but I didn't know they also exploited essentially f̵o̵r̵c̵e̵d̵free labour, that one was new to me. Apparently in the constitution and everything. Remind me again why some people believe America to be "the land of the free"?

[deleted]

Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#89

Post by qingcharles »

embedding-shape wrote: post #45
Aurornis wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, the prisoners aren’t literally forced to do this work. It’s a job they can choose to apply for and do while in prison. (EDIT: In my state, it might be different in other states) The contention is about how much they’re paid per hour.

> To be clear, the prisoners aren’t literally forced to do this work. Not 100% true it seems, but happy for someone else to correct me. > Prison labor in the US is mostly optional - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

It's technically optional in most institutions, but not practically optional. For instance, a lot of labor can reduce your sentence, can give you better housing and can enable you to afford things on commissary you might need (e.g. phone time, hygiene products etc).

Re: Using TypeScript to obtain one of the rarest license plates

#90

Post by pizzalife »

Someone1234 wrote: post #82
jfindper wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fun thing about the computer fraud and abuse act is that just about anything can be made into a federal crime with it!

Considering it was created during a major moral panic after the movie "War Games" came out, by a bunch of politicians who knew nothing about computers (aside from, again, watching the movie War Games). As a direct result, anything and everything can be a crime (e.g. violating a private company's Terms & Conditions), and the punishments are completely disproportionate to the actual criminality. See the AT&T/iPad data…

  See the AT&T/iPad data leak, where AT&T were leaking private information on the internet with no security checks at all. Someone found it, told the press, who in turn told AT&T, but the FBI still investigated it as a "crime", raided their home, charged them with "conspiracy to access a computer without authorization." AT&T go no punishment at all.
I think you are missing some nuance here. They found a vulnerability where they could just increment an "id" and get access to another user's information. They then went ahead and scraped as much as they could. Also this person (iProphet / weev / Andrew Auernheimer) is awful and certainly not a victim. AT&T did not leak the information, Andrew did!

Should they have had better security? Yes. Was the vulnerability extremely basic? Yes. Doesn't change much, a vulnerability was used to dump a bunch of private data.

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